In the process of reviewing documentation for Orchestra.io, I found that it doesn't allow file uploads. Instead, it's recommended that Amazon S3 be used for file hosting. If you aren't familiar with it, S3 is an online storage web service that is part of Amazon Web Services (AWS). It provides access to fairly cheap storage through a variety of web service interfaces. This article will demonstrate how to sign up for an Amazon S3 account and use PEAR's Services_Amazon_S3 package to interact with S3 in your own application.

They walk you through the whole process - getting signed up at the AWS site, creating credentials, installing the Services_Amazon_S3 package (via the PEAR installer) and using it in some sample scripts.

Cloud computing promises unlimited disk space for users and applications. In an ideal world, accessing that storage would be as easy as accessing a local hard drive. Unfortunately, the basic APIs of most cloud storage services force programmers to think about protocols and configuration details instead of simply working with their data. This article looks at classes in the Zend Framework that make it easy to use Amazon's S3 cloud storage service as a boundless hard drive.

Their sample application will show you how to grab the list of your buckets and objects as well as work with current items and create new ones. The interface is made much simpler by the Zend_Service_Amazon_S3 component.

I'm pleased to announce the Zend Framework 1.8.0 release, the first in our 1.8 series of releases. This release marks the culmination of several long-standing projects, as well as a formalization of many of our recommended practices.

The new rapid application development features include something that's been a long time coming, Zend_Tool. It gives you a command-line interface to build out ZF project parts and configure/display settings for them. Zend_Application was also released in relation to provide a standardized way for boostraping applications with either default configurations or custom settings.

Since cloud computing use has been on the rise, the ZF development team has added in two new components - interfaces for Amazon's Simple Storage Service and the Elastic Compute Cloud.

You can read more in the official press release from Zend.

A lot of functionality is shared among applications - like sending emails or preventing spam. In the spirit of reusing the wheel instead of reinventing it, here are nine free web libraries that you can use in your next program which will dramatically increase your efficiency.

Here's their list:

• ReCAPTCHA
• Akismet
• Services_JSON
• Smarty
• pChart
• SimplePie
• XML-RPC PHP Library
• Amazon S3
• PHPMailer

Screenshots (and code examples) are provided for several of the items as well as links to their website and documentation pages.

Cloud computing refers to the utilization of shared, elastic resources and processing power accessed via the Internet. In some ways, it hails the reversion to the golden age of time-sharing but with significant improvements to the distribution philosophies underlying the delivery infrastructure. [...] Cloud-based development involves in some sense, the outsourcing, of various parts of the application out of the server and into the cloud.

Included is an illustration of how an application would interact with the cloud and an example of working with the S3 service that Amazon offers. The example mentions both the normal services and something called the "elastic compute cloud" that lets you use remote services to run virtual instances of other operating systems.

However, over the past few years, WebDAV has started gaining traction as the underlying protocol for Subversion repositories over the web and in several other places. That makes this story about a new PHP library for working with WebDAV interesting.

He notes that he's moved a lot of his file storage to Amazon's s3 service and having this new PHP library would make it even easier for him to get at his content directly from his applications.

This is an example of non-interactive PHP script which downloads file from Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service). Additional libraries like HMAC-SHA1 are not required.

You'll need at least PHP 4.1.0 or higher to follow along but the entire code block is there and ready for use. It makes the GET request to the bucket for your object with the correct authentication and opens a socket to pull the file down.

PHP streams are absolutely amazing. As mentioned by Elizabeth Smith (a great read if you don't know how to use streams) PHP streams are super powerful. Streams is something that is (to my knowledge) unique to PHP. The closest thing I've seen to it, is Linux's FUSE "user space" (i.e. not kernel module) file systems.

He shows an example of a stream in action and suggests an interface he'd like to see - an automatic connection to the Amazon S3 storage.